Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  The hold is lifted and the clock starts again.

  T minus ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.

  Go for main engine start.

  Main engine start.

  Five.

  Four.

  Three.

  Two.

  At one, the solid rocket boosters ignite. I see the flash on the horizon, and the unmistakable orange of that flash makes me gasp with something like horror. I clasp both hands to my chest, because it suddenly hurts. I’m aware that this is a ridiculous gesture, but I can’t help myself. I’d become convinced this launch wasn’t going to happen today, that I’d get the chance to do this all again tomorrow. But once the solid rocket boosters ignite, they can’t be shut down. We are going to space.

  Atlantis pulls itself away from the grip of gravity, slowly at first, then faster. The flames streaking from the shuttle’s main engines light up the sky. Once Atlantis has been in the air a few long seconds, the sound reaches us, that deeply satisfying rumble, and here at the Press Site that rumble reverberates everywhere, against the VAB, against the countdown clock, against Walter Cronkite’s CBS building and all the others, against the trees in Norman Mailer’s jungle, against our very hearts and bodies, against the hearts and bodies of those watching with us.

  “Max Q,” speaks the voice of the public affairs officer one minute after launch. The shuttle has reached the peak of aerodynamic pressure. Then, at two minutes, the solid rocket boosters jettison for the last time.

  Every space shuttle launch is a little different. With this launch, what I will remember most is the brightness, the intense orange flame that almost burns my eyes. Knowing that this launch is the last, and seeing it against the backdrop of such a gray and uncertain sky, I can’t help but see Atlantis’s brightness as some sort of defiance.

  “Negative return,” speaks the voice of the public affairs officer, at four minutes after launch, the point past which the vehicle can no longer abort and return to Kennedy. He says it with a hint of a thrill in his voice, a satisfaction that everything has gone as planned, but to us standing with our heads tipped back, gawking at the sky, it sounds like a declaration, for the millionth time, that something we love is now over.

  “Main engine cutoff,” capcom says at nearly nine minutes.

  “Roger MECO,” the commander answers.

  “ET separation,” capcom says. This means the giant orange fuel tank has dropped off to burn up in the atmosphere, that now Atlantis is traveling by itself, the black-and-white space plane alone. Ten minutes after launch, we wouldn’t be able to make out Atlantis even if the sky were clear. It would be too small; it’s gone.

  “Atlantis is now on orbit,” the public affairs officer announces, and it’s hard to believe that those hands we saw waving from their Astrovan here on Earth a few hours ago are now floating weightless, waving at black sky with stars out Atlantis’s windows.

  Goodbye, Atlantis.

  All around me, people are crying and hugging. The photojournalists are snapping pictures of people crying and hugging. I am still watching the now-empty sky, staring at the enormous fluffy column of steam Atlantis left hanging there, trying to absorb that this really happened, that the shuttle will really never launch again.

  Before NASA sent men to the moon, when the Kennedy Space Center was still new, components of the Apollo spacecraft were constructed in California and brought here, romantically, by ship. They left port from the California coast and sailed south on the Pacific, made their way through the Panama Canal, then north again through the Caribbean and up the Gulf Stream to Cape Canaveral. The Gulf Stream had been discovered 453 years earlier by Juan Ponce de León who, we all agree now, was wrong to look for gold and the Fountain of Youth. These things weren’t here, and he killed many people trying to find them. He took slaves instead, and the way some accounts try to make excuses for his treatment of his fellow human beings reminds me of those apologists for Wernher von Braun who try to minimize his complicity with the Nazi regime that forced slave laborers to build his rockets. We remember Juan Ponce as an explorer, a man of courage and conviction. Like Wernher von Braun, like Norman Mailer, like Captain James Cook and the other ruthless men whose stories I have learned, Ponce de León believed that the vision in his mind was more important than anything else, more important than the people standing in his way. What he saw that spring day in 1513, when he climbed out of his stinking, flea-infested galleon, is oddly similar to what I see today. Miles of marsh, a hot sky, a lot of canebrake. He climbed back into his ship and moved on. He didn’t come back for eight years—the same length of time between the end of Apollo and the start of shuttle—and he came back that second time with the intention of creating a permanent colony. In between he wrote to his king, Charles V, begging for money: “That which is made or seen in those places where I shall go will be reported to Your Majesty upon my return, and I shall ask for favors. And from now on I pray they are brought to me, because I cannot imagine undertaking such a grand thing.” Like Christopher Columbus, with whom Juan Ponce had made his first voyage to the New World, he faced the problem of bankrolling a second voyage when the first had been found to be culturally and geographically thrilling but financially disappointing. His tone echoes that of a NASA budget proposal, referring to lofty goals and the grand attributes of a great nation in the face of profitlessness. As historian Robert Fuson writes, “There was a need for something spectacular to come out of the voyage if support for it was to be sustained.” On his second voyage to La Florida, Juan Ponce engaged in a battle with natives and died from an arrow wound to the thigh. The settlement he had dreamed of founding was a failure, and Florida would not be home to Europeans until the founding of Saint Augustine in 1561, forty years later—the same length of time since we’ve been to the moon.

  What does it mean that we have been going to space for fifty years and have decided to stop? Maybe it’s only a fantasy that the explorers of the past were met with better funding and smoother travels. Maybe they all had to beg for money; they all found themselves doing less than had been planned, less than had been hoped for. They all compromised the morals that had been the ostensible inspiration for the voyage. Maybe it was true for them as much as it is for NASA, that their discoveries are celebrated only once they have been successful. Only in retrospect does the support seem to have been inevitable. Only in retrospect does the dream seem to have fully come true.

  I think of Omar, who is still on the other side of the VAB. Like me, he had guessed today’s attempt would scrub, that he would be able to come back and see this tomorrow.

  I text him the most direct question I have ever asked him.

  Are you crying?

  A minute goes by. Everyone out here is crying and hugging, texting, and describing what they saw all at once. Omar’s response finally comes through.

  Hahahah. Are you?

  Back inside the News Center, a closed-circuit TV shows the White Room, the staging area directly outside the hatch to the crew cabin. This room is the territory of the closeout crew, whose responsibilities include strapping the crew violently into their seats one by one, making sure the right objects are inside of (and outside of) the spacecraft, closing the hatch, and pressurizing the crew cabin before taking shelter for launch.

  The closed-circuit view of the White Room has shown these closeout guys all morning doing their job, which includes a lot of standing around and talking into their headsets. There were exciting moments each time one of the pumpkin-suited astronauts arrived to make last-minute preparations—donning cumbersome emergency parachutes, straightening out hoses and comm wires, then climbing through the hatch one by one to take their seats. There is always a fair amount of handshaking and shoulder-clapping, much of it ritualistic, maybe even superstitious. The closeout crew wear emergency equipment of their own—yellow safety harnesses and oxygen packs on their backs in case of disaster on the pad. They are trained, along with the astronauts, to escape clouds of toxic fuels by running down a bright
yellow path painted onto the catwalk, nicknamed the Yellow Brick Road, and jumping into baskets that zip down trip wires the nineteen stories to the ground. None of this has ever been used in an actual emergency, and it’s possible none of it would help anyway. But it still serves to make the closeout crew seem like badasses. They are regarded by other spaceworkers with some degree of awe, partly because of the risk and importance of their work, and partly because of their proximity to the astronauts. Every description I have ever seen of the closeout crew has mentioned that they are the last to see and shake hands with the astronauts before they leave Earth.

  Now, in the aftermath of the launch, we see in the White Room one of the technicians position himself in front of the camera. He holds up a sign printed on whiteboard. At one edge is printed an image of the launch vehicle, a billowing steam cloud forming under it, against a rippling American flag. In the center of the sign are printed the words:

  Thank you America!

  He is, like most of them, a former-military-looking guy. His white ball cap bears the United Space Alliance logo. He stands before the camera, looking right into it, holding up his sign, and he appears to be in equal measure uncomfortable with the public nature of this act and pride-filled that he gets to carry it out. He steps away, his tool belt clanging against his legs, and is replaced by another member of the closeout crew, this one older, maybe in his fifties. His sign reads:

  On behalf of all who have Designed & Built …

  He too looks right into the camera, looking mildly embarrassed, but then he lifts his chin, almost defiantly, and holds the sign up a bit more. Both bashful and sincere, a combination I find somehow heartrending. The idea of all these introverts collaborating in this very extroverted gesture, knowing their images would remain for all time. He is replaced by another one, this one a little more smiley and chipper. His sign reads:

  Serviced & Loaded …

  Launched & Controlled …

  The next guy a little more laconic, straight-faced, but he too relifts his sign a few seconds into his turn, pushes it a bit more toward the camera.

  Operated & Flown …

  These Magnificent Space Vehicles

  The next guy is younger, taller.

  Thank you for 30 years with Our Nation’s Space Shuttles!

  He is replaced by yet another guy, proud to get to hold this particular sign. He is the only one to mouth the words on his sign, though he knows we cannot hear him. Then he salutes.

  Godspeed Atlantis!

  Last to go is a short man with a Wilford Brimley mustache. He is the chief of the closeout crew, Travis Thompson. He does not smile, and of all of them he looks most solemn, most self-conscious, maybe closest to tears. He is the only one whose headset is still plugged into the comm box behind him, a curling black cord tethering his head to the wall. He opens his mouth as if to say the words, but then chooses not to, or can’t. His sign says:

  God Bless America!

  He stands there for a minute, letting his message sink in.

  I watch all this on the monitor, feeling aware of the people watching around me. Some of them seem to be glued to the closeout crew’s messages and their implied import, as I am. Some of them seem to be moved nearly to tears by it, as I am. Some glance up at the monitor, register the signs, and keep talking to each other, messing with their cameras and their phones, moving about as if the screen were showing nothing other than the closeout crew going about their prescribed business.

  I know I will look up this video online later, when I get back to my motel. It’s probably already on NASA TV—or if it’s not yet, it will be shortly. I know I will watch it again and again in an attempt to write about it, a document of a document. It’s the best way I know of to get a moment to hold still and reveal itself.

  For each of these launches I have studied videos afterward and have noticed that I always see more in the videos than I did in real time. The real experience always goes too fast, is too multisensory—a fellow space fan brushing against my elbow at Endeavour, struggling to keep my balance on the roof of my car at Discovery, the eerie storm clouds, the merciless orange numbers of the countdown clock at Atlantis. The lived detail of each actual launch is too much to take in. But the videos, with their finite frames and running times, those I can put words to.

  In recent years much has been made of the way our ever-present cameras and connections to social media interfere with our ability to live our lives in real time through our own senses. We are too busy photographing our lunches to taste them, the argument goes, too busy Facebook messaging our friends to talk to them or listen to them. To some extent I get this—when Omar chose not to try to tilt his camera to follow Endeavour’s path, he was choosing the lived experience over the burden of documenting it, and in that I think he chose well. Yet the video he shot contains a permanence that the real experience doesn’t, and as such it will be viewed by many people who couldn’t be at the launch, including people who haven’t been born yet, people for whom American spaceflight might have been only an idea, a vague claim, if not for Omar’s document of that moment that lets them experience a version of it for themselves.

  I know I’m supposed to value lived experiences more than I do their digital records, but for me, this video in the White Room is not a simulacrum of something else; it is precisely what its makers intended it to be. The experience of watching this video, as with videos of launches and other events I will watch over and over, is an experience, just as seeing the real event was, and as I watch it, through my watching, each video becomes more of what it is about.

  That night, I have dinner with Omar, three photographers, and a filmmaker. It’s a table only a shuttle launch could bring together—one woman and five men, all with drastically different backgrounds and interests, no two of whom live in the same state (one lives in New Zealand). But we chat happily together about what we saw today. We have chosen a local seafood restaurant popular with tourists, the kind of place with a lot of nautical bric-a-brac on the walls, restroom doors labeled BUOYS and GULLS. This place has been busy every time I’ve been here, but tonight it is truly overrun. Our waiter has the blank look of a person who has been harried for over four hours and has settled into his suffering, a look that tells us we won’t be getting our food any time soon.

  People are made patient by unusual circumstances, and the familiar postlaunch sunburn-and-patriotism atmosphere prevails even though the waitstaff can’t keep drinks refilled quickly enough for anyone to really be drunk. We are all sleep-deprived and have the fuzzy giddiness that drunks and college students call “the second wind.” Rather than napping this afternoon, I drank coffee and stayed up to write pages and pages of frantic notes. The photographers stayed up as well, to work on digitally processing their shots. One of them, the photographer from New Zealand, has been up for over forty-eight hours.

  We talk about previous launches we’ve been to, how they were different from today’s. As usually happens when people start comparing launch experiences, a lot of the stories are about spending hours at a viewing spot only to see the launch called off, the empty feeling of going home without having seen anything. It takes me a moment to realize that I will never see a shuttle launch scrub. For some reason this makes me feel triumphant, like I have won something.

  “I’m scrubless!” I announce to the table. They applaud me politely. It’s a nearly unbelievable bit of luck—the chances of seeing four launches with zero scrubs are very low. The risk of having to return to Florida for multiple attempts for each mission was great enough to make me doubt whether I should embark on this project at all. I announce my scrubless status on social media, though most of my friends will have no idea what this word means. While I’m looking in my phone, I flip through images of the launch online—shots taken by people at this table, shots by photographers from Reuters and AP, shots from random people posting on Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s perhaps too obvious to bear mentioning, but the number and range of photos is astoundin
g, the different colors and moods of the same object, the same event, the same few minutes. Each one feels different, each carries a slightly different meaning. I receive via e-mail a photo taken by a new space friend, Anna, who was standing behind me—it’s a shot of the back of my head with Atlantis seeming to emerge from it. I show the others. This, I tell them, I will treasure forever.

  One of the photographers at the table, famous for his surreally beautiful travel photographs taken around the world, mentions to us that he was referred to Omar by two different mutual acquaintances. It’s an unfamiliar experience to share Omar with other people. I usually have him to myself.

  “I heard about this guy named Omar who worked for NASA, and then my other friend was like, ‘Look for Omar the security guard! He’s really cool!’”

  I flinch inwardly at the phrase “security guard,” and watch Omar for his reaction. As usual he betrays none; his smile is as friendly as always. Since even before I met him in person, since I started to get an idea of what his job was, I sensed that Omar was not a security guard, but played a role more demanding and much more important. Now that I have been here as his guest on five different occasions, have seen his and his father’s dedication to the project of sending people safely to space, have seen his encyclopedic knowledge of the work that has gone on here before him, the term strikes me as even more inappropriate, even offensive. I want to speak up and correct the photographer’s misunderstanding, but I’m not entirely sure what I would say. Omar is an orbiter integrity clerk, a lay historian of American spaceflight, an ambassador for the Kennedy Space Center, a good friend, and a fine human being. I say nothing. No one else seems to think much of the phrase one way or the other.

  Another photographer asks the table what’s next, what the next step in spaceflight is supposed to be. I’ve been taken aback throughout the day by how tenuous a grasp of space history and space policy many of my fellow credentialed media representatives seem to have. A few of us start to answer simultaneously.